National council report backs sustainable food

AGRICULTURE

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

A shopper chooses from a variety of cauliflower from the Specialty Produce stand at the Heart of the City farmers market at UN Plaza in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, July 8, 2009. Vendors at the civic center market have long been accepting food stamp tokens from customers. A plan proposed by Mayor Newsom will require all farmers markets to do the same citywide. less

A shopper chooses from a variety of cauliflower from the Specialty Produce stand at the Heart of the City farmers market at UN Plaza in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, July 8, 2009. Vendors at the civic ... more

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

National council report backs sustainable food

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

The prestigious National Research Council threw its considerable heft behind the sustainable food movement Tuesday with a 570-page report that endorses the new food and farm practices that began in the Bay Area and have taken the nation by storm.

There are now twice as many farmers - 30,000 to 40,000 - selling local meat and produce in farmers' markets than there are growing cotton, a major industrial crop, said August Schumacher, an author of the report and a former undersecretary of agriculture in the George H.W. Bush administration.

"This is not just San Francisco, Boston and New York," Schumacher said of what has been called alternative agriculture but is fast going mainstream - everything from the locavore, organic and "slow food" movements to animal welfare advocacy. "It's Kansas City. It's Boise, Idaho. It's Abingdon, Va."

External costs

Latest Living videos

While the industrial farm model has generated astonishing efficiency gains and lowered the cost of food, the report found, it has imposed enormous external costs on the environment, human health, animal welfare and workers that are not included in the price of food.

Julia Kornegay, the chair of the committee that wrote the report and chair of the department of horticulture science at North Carolina State University, said the industrial farm system has become increasingly fragile and prone to outside shocks such as a sudden increase in oil or feed prices, water shortages or concerns about food safety.

"If something gets out of whack," she said, industrial food production "is no longer sustainable without huge subsidies. The system is no longer as robust as it was."

She said resilience to such shocks needs to be built back into food production, in part because of rising concern about the effects of industrial food production on the environment, animals and human health.

Produced by a dozen academic and industry leaders and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the report squares off against a growing backlash by proponents of industrial agriculture to what they see as a utopian and romanticized vision of pastoral life that would take food production back to the 19th century and starve the world.

Paarlberg says the new food movement is playing out on Africa's small, impoverished farms, where most of the continent's people earn $1 a day, where 80 percent of the labor is done by women and children, where animals forage, insecticides and herbicides are unaffordable and food imports are the only barrier to starvation.

Kornegay acknowledged the demands of a world population expected to reach 9 billion people in the next 50 years or less. She said the first of four priorities outlined in the report is to produce enough food to meet human needs.

But she insisted that the other three priorities must be incorporated in this aim: protecting the environment and natural resource base on which food production depends; maintaining profitability for farmers to allow them to continue to grow food; and increasing the quality of life for farmers, farmworkers and society.

Movements uniting

Schumacher, executive chairman of Wholesome Wave Foundation, which is working to expand access by poor Americans to locally grown food, pointed to several forces coming together in the United States behind the new food movement:

-- UC Berkeley journalism Professor Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," followed by documentaries such as "Food, Inc.," and "King Corn," opened a broad-scale attack on the industrial farm model.

-- First lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" anti-obesity campaign has mobilized every arm of the federal government, from the White House garden to the Department of Agriculture, toward promoting fresh food.

"People want pure, safe, healthy, more affordable food that is fair and pays workers, including young people, reasonable wages," Schumacher said. "The most popular undergraduate course today at Harvard University is one on food and culture. Michael Pollan is required reading at the University of Pennsylvania. Young people are driving this."

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.